Wiki Training Lecture

Google Account

• Log in. You must be on the AguaClara team to have access to the username and password.
• There is a folder for every team where you can store all of your documents.
• You can share these documents with your personal account so that it is easier for you to edit them.
  • To do this: Click share... in the upper right hand corner. Click on Invite People. Add your email address. Make sure the To Edit bullet point is selected. Hit send.
• Calendars. Each team has their own calendar. This should be used as a way to keep track of meeting times and deadlines for assignments. To view a certain calendar just click on it so it is highlighted under My Calendars. You can then click on a specific date to add an event.
  • You can share the calendars with yourself by clicking on the down arrow next to the calendar name under My Calendars, clicking Share This Calendar, adding your email address, selecting Make changes AND manage sharing under the Permission Settings tab and clicking Add Person.
  • It is a good idea to share the cuaguaclara calendar with yourself because it has deadlines and general AguaClara events.
  • Karen and Monroe's calendars are under Other Calendars if you would like to make an appointment with them.

General Information and Introduction

The wiki is not meant to be an online repository for reports. It is a dynamic database that we continually update. It is meant to provide resources on every facet of AguaClara, from research to design to outreach to syntax and grammar! Whenever you are updating the wiki, think very carefully about where you are placing information and how you are presenting it.

Always Remember!

1. The wiki is our face of open source engineering. That means that everyone from scientists and engineers to potential donors to your parents goes on it to see what we are up to. Every word you write must be spellchecked and professional.
2. The wiki is used for communication between teams, the engineers in Honduras, and future members of the project.
3. Please do not just put stuff up here to make it look like you've been doing extra work. It doesn't fool anyone and it just means that your midterm or final feedback will tell you to rewrite everything! This is a real database and we cannot have it bogged down with fluff. The wiki is a dynamic database. You should update the wiki, not just add to it, so if something is out of date you may delete it or fix it.
4. The answers to most of your questions and uncertainties are probably already there. We have an in-depth wiki organization guide, photos, and there are always other pages to steal formatting code from.
5. You can and should always ask the Team Leader or any returning member for help with the wiki if you have questions.
6. The wiki is set up like a tree, there are important branches fanning outward from the Home page and where you put new pages in the hierarchy is very important.

A Tour of the Wiki

Start the tour at the Home page, it can be accessed by typing aguaclara.cee.cornell.edu and clicking "More Resources and Documentation".

• From the home page you can easily access the major branches of the project: Research, Automated Design Tool, and Outreach by clicking on Navigation Menu in the top left corner. Another important branch from the home page is Team Member Resources
  • What is a child page? Each successive branch of the tree is a child page of the branch above it. Design Calendar is a child page of Design, for instance.
• How do you find
  • Past research
    • Go to the Research to see all of the teams that currently exist and have existed in the past. A typical research page is Home>research>Chemical Dose Controller
  • Assignments Home>Team Member Resources>Assignments
    • Due dates are all on the syllabus
  • the sandbox
    • This one is trickier because you cannot navigate directly to it, you have to use the search field. The sandbox is not navigable because it is just a place to play--if you are not sure about how to do something, try the code in the sandbox first so you can test if it works without messing up your own wiki page.

Editing the Wiki

The most important part of editing the wiki is using the Wiki Organization Guide Home>team resources>wiki organization guide. Here you can find directions for formatting assignments, figures, pictures, equations, etc.

• Log in
  • Go to View on the top left of any wiki page.
  • Click on Account>Log In>Log in with Cornell NetID
• Creating a new page
  • Be sure you are on the page that you would like your new page to be a child page of.
  • Click on Edit in the top left corner
  • Go to New>Page
  • You can add a template for some pages. The "Global" templates aren't useful, but some of the ones labeled "Space" are.
  • Naming Pages: Do not name a page too generally. When you use a name, that can be the only time you use it on the wiki. Each team's calendar page is named "Design Calendar" "Outreach Calendar", etc., so that the word Calendar is not hogged by one time. Also the page name becomes part of its web address, so it is helpful to be descriptive.
  • When editing a page immediately set the default to Wiki Markup and not Rich Text (rich text seems easy but there are a lot of bugs in it and it is harder to keep our formatting consistent with it, wiki markup is easy to learn and it allows us to all use the same headings, bullets, etc)
  • The sidebar give you helpful hints for
    • Text Formatting
    • Headings
    • Lists
    • Tables
  • To create a link:
    • Type the URL of the website and add brackets [] around the outside.
    • If the page is on the wiki, you can just type the name of the page (Design Calendar, for instance) inside the brackets.
    • If you would like to have someone go to a link by clicking on word instead of a URL (For examples: Check out this awesome website! where clicking on website brings you to google), type a bracket, then the word, then a | then the URL, then the ending bracket.
  • You can move the location of a page by dragging it around on the tree at the bottom of the page while you are editing it.
  • To delete a page, go to Remove Page on the top right corner while editing it.
  • To edit a page that already exists, go to Edit on the top left>Edit this page...

ALSO...
There is another way to update the wiki! Recently developed by Monroe, you can now upload and view Microsoft Word documents on the wiki instead of typing it in the page edit view. This Draft page will show you how it looks.

Your First Wiki Assignment

All team members have to make sure their contact info is correct on our roster Home>team resources>team roster and alumni. Please fix it yourself if it is wrong.

Go to assignments create personal wiki page and follow the directions there.

Team Leader Preparation for Wiki Training Lecture

Make sure you have created the new semester's team roster before giving this lecture! Also make sure you have added all new members to the wiki as directed at the bottom of the list of early responsibilities

This lecture is meant to provide an outline of basic skills team members need to successfully edit the wiki. Without these skills they will be unable to do any of the assignments or correctly document their research, so this lecture is very important. Make sure to host this lecture in a computer lab so every student can sit on the wiki and follow along while you project your screen in the front of the room and lead them. Carpenter Library has the Accel labs, which are OK for this. The wiki becomes overloaded very easily, however, so it might be best for several students to work together or even for students not to follow along if it slows your presentation down significantly.